Khronos Releases OpenGL ES 3.0 Specs: Allowing the Next Generation of Mobile Applications to Benefit from Richer 3D Features and Enhanced Portability

The Khronos Group announced the release of the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification, bringing significant functionality and portability enhancements to the industry-leading, royalty-free 3D graphics API (application programming interface) that is used on the majority of the world’s smartphones and tablets. OpenGL ES 3.0 provides access to state-of-the-art graphics processing unit (GPU) functionality with portability across diverse mobile and embedded operating systems and platforms. OpenGL ES 3.0 is backwards compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0, enabling applications to incrementally add new visual features to applications.

New functionality in the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification includes:

multiple enhancements to the rendering pipeline to enable acceleration of advanced visual effects including: occlusion queries, transform feedback, instanced rendering and support for four or more rendering targets;

high quality ETC2 / EAC texture compression as a standard feature, eliminating the need for a different set of textures for each platform;

a new version of the GLSL ES shading language with full support for integer and 32-bit floating point operations;